…because bombing from afar was not the only way we worked to disassemble their capabilities? Ask Bill Clinton how effective airstrikes alone were against Al Qaeda.
Bin Laden had a dark beard, and seems like it got lighter as he aged.
This is the thread where we respond with non sequiturs about terrorism, right? Because your post sure didn’t respond to the fact I stated: we bombed the crap out of Al Qaida central and we didn’t see thousands of angry people rushing to join bin Laden. In fact, core Al Qaida is basically over and done with, and so far as I know, we didn’t beat them through a battle or ideology. We consistently bombed and killed Al Qaida leaders until the group just sort of fell apart with a whimper.
If you are you seriously claiming “we” beat Al Qaida at all, never mind via a bombing campaign, then there is no point in even thinking of continuing this discussion - you got everyone neatly boxed up there, right? Smash team A out the park, now move onto team B, right?
Lets just not bother.
So, with ISIL hungry to keep people around as recruits, and the refugee situation as it is now, how many reasonable ways are there for innocent civilians to get out of the way of these airstrikes?
If Assad doesn’t go first, there basically is no Syrian state to use as the basis to defeat ISIL. Assad hasn’t yet lost Damascus, but he’s lost the civil war. There is no future of Syria where he can stay on. There is no end to the civil war until he goes.
He doesn’t have to leave in a body bag. In fact, it’s worse if he does. If there’s a negotiated exit, then the Syrian government has a chance to be put back together.
You quite simply have to be swallowing a complete load of bullshit to think that Assad can ever consolidate power again. It’s nothing more than Russian and Assad propaganda.
Do you think that Saddam could have fixed Iraq if he were put back in power in 2007, four and a half years after the place fell apart? That Saddam could have united the country and destroyed AQI? Of course not!
Then why do you think that Assad, four and a half years after Syria fell apart, can put it back together again? He can’t. It is a fantasy.
The only course is for him to go and maybe - just maybe - someone else can start putting Syria back together again, very slowly. And it is going to take a long time. But we can’t wind back the clock to 2010 and make him the strong man he once was. It’s a stupid idea from stupid people.
For the fourth time, we bombed the shit out of Al Qaida. Why are they not the most powerful terrorist group out there? You said that bombing makes terrorists stronger because bombing makes people want to join terrorist groups that are being slayed.
Where is the proof of what you allege?
Because that worked so well with the Nazis.
Not me. Bombs away, I say. Fuck ISIS.
British Labour party Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn’s parliamentary speech yesterday in support of military action against ISIL in Syria elicited clapping and cheering from all sides of the House of Commons and has received widespread acclaim - it’s worth a listen.
I support the decision taken by the British Parliament.
If you remember back to early last year, Obama was receiving criticism for not using American air power to support Iraqi forces fighting militants in the west of Iraq, stating that the Iraqi government needed to get their political house in order and end the Shia political domination over the Sunnis that had been cultivated under Nouri al-Maliki’s administration.
In just a few short months, ISIL made breathtaking military gains, capturing up to 90% of Anbar province (including the cities of Fallujah, Al Qaim and Abu Ghraib), most of Nineveh province (including the cities of Tikrit, Mosul and Sinjar), along with parts of Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Diyala provinces. There was even a very real fear that Baghdad itself would fall.
It was only when the United States took the decision in August 2014 to launch airstrikes against ISIL that the Islamic militant group’s advance in Iraq began to be slowed, halted and then began to be reversed. There have been the odd setback (such as Ramadi falling to ISIL in May 2015), but airstrikes have played a key part in turning the tide and, since they commenced in the middle of last year, there have been many successes: assisting Kurdish and Iraqi forces in liberating Tikrit and Sinjar (the latter of strategic significance cutting the supply line between ISIL’s headquarters in Raqqa and Mosul); preventing genocide against the tens of thousands of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar; retaking control of the Mosul and Haditha Dams; eliminating various members of ISIL leadership, including seriously injuring ISIL’s leader al-Baghdadi (severely compromising his ability to command); recapturing the major Baiji oil refinery; disrupting ISIL’s ability to gain oil revenue, including blowing up hundreds of tankers; killing tens of thousands of ISIL fighters and destroying hundreds of armored fighting vehicles.
The West must accept that they are at war with ISIL whether they like it or not, for ISIL have declared war against us. This is not a localized regional conflict for which a negotiated political settlement can be made - ISIL’s ultimate ambition is no less than the expansion of a Caliphate over the whole planet. To leave ISIL unchecked would be allowing them to consolidate in Syria and Iraq and then spread their cancer to Turkey, Jordan and beyond to Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and North Africa.
There is no point in hindering ourselves by fighting ISIL with one arm tied behind our back. The border between Iraq and Syria is imaginary - ISIL operate across it with fluid impunity and so action needs to be undertaken in both countries. The United Nations Security Council is unanimous in its intent to tackle this "unprecedented” threat to international peace and security. The effects of ISIL’s growth in the Middle East are already being strongly felt in the West with terror attacks (many of which have been foiled by intelligence services before being launched) and millions of refugees seeking sanctuary.
ISIL’s ranks number in the tens of thousands. The rest of the world, unified in their condemnation of ISIL, number in their billions. We must be united against our common enemy. Our fathers and grandfathers faced greater and more dangerous evils and defeated them. Airstrikes are not the absolute solution to the Syria-Iraq crisis - that will only come with political dialogue and negotiated settlement (with Assad’s regime in Syria and resolving Sunni-Shia disparities in Iraq). But to do nothing would only allow the unmitigated malevolence of ISIL to gain in strength and confidence and spread its dark shadow over the Middle East and beyond.
Hear hear!
There’s comparing apples to oranges, then there’s comparing apples to McNuggets, and then there’s whatever the hell that is.
Different groups require different strategies. Different ideas are easier to discredit than others. The ideas which motivate ISIS are based on plausible readings of Islamic texts, and those texts have stood for 1,400 years and counting. Kill ISIS and the ideas which motivate them remain. The Nazis, on the other hand…well, let’s just say that Mein Kampf turned out to be a little easier to discredit.
To be fair, the Nazis probably had more support in Germany than ISIS does in those parts of Syria and Iraq that they control. ISIS controls much of the territory they do not because of some popular groundswell for them, but because they took it over by force of arms. Civilians fleeing ISIS make up part of Syria’s refugee crisis, and one of ISIS’s main problem in the areas they control is keeping people there. They have a hard core of fanatics who believe in their ideology, but much of the population under their control is in fear of them. You’re right that bombing isn’t going to change the viewpoint of ISIS and their supporters, but one thing bombing might do is limit their offensive capability and their ability to expand into more territory, and might make it easier for those groups fighting them on the ground (and there are a whole lot of people fighting them on the ground), take territory that ISIS controls.
Didn’t many people say the very same thing in September of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland? Wasn’t our problem to fix? And what the fuck, the slaughtering of innocent people that followed wasn’t our problem to fix either, right?
I can’t believe you are this ignorant. It’s the world’s problem to fix, and we’re part of that world.
Godwin, is that you? Da-esh = Hitler. :smack: How could I have not seen that.
If that’s what you really think, then why aren’t we sending in thousands and thousands of ground troops? D-Day on the Euphrates. Or, how was it that we ended the war in the Pacific? Let’s drop the big one!!
Well, in your defense, it’s probably hard to see anything with your head so far up your ass.
Bad example, anti-Nazi propaganda not withstanding.
Guernica was a strategic target, an important bridge that was well defended. Ground troops later followed the bombardement.
Tfb, the point was general to that Civil War, and also about $600 billion seemingly not buying you options outside a range available in the 1930s.
So the problem with ISIL, in your view, is that they would just kind of go away if we had someone who better understood Islamic texts calmly explain to ISIL that they’re doing things wrong.
I nominate you to go tell the death cult that they should lighten up a little.
Sneer all you like, but the fact remains that without belief in the inerrancy of the Koran, without belief in the rewards of martyrdom, and without belief in the necessity of a caliphate, ISIS couldn’t exist. Everything they do can be tied directly to scripture. Throwing gays off buildings? There’s a verse for that. Sexual violence and slavery? There’s a verse for that. Persecution of the Yazidis? Spoiler alert: There’s a verse for that too.
The war against Islamic terrorism will never be won while the beliefs which inspire it still have currency. As satisfying as it might feel to bomb ISIS to smithereens, it won’t make a scrap of difference long term. In five years time we’ll be fighting ISIS again under a different name. And five years after that. And five years after that. And so on, and so on for as long as these ideas have credibility.
I don’t know how we’re going to win this war of ideas. All I know is that I can’t envision a solution in which dropping 500lb bombs on innocent civilians plays an integral part. Bombing ISIS without addressing the ideas which motivate them is like sticking a band-aid over a sucking chest wound. No matter how many you slap on, ain’t nobody ever going to call you a Doctor.
And there’s not a thing in the world you, or anyone, is going to do to reprogram them.
A political approach to the ISIS problem is like using prayer to cure cancer.
Pray all you like, but bomb the stuffing out of it with chemotherapy too.
There’s another point as well. All the while we’re playing Whack-A-Mole with Islamic terrorists, technology is becoming more advanced, more accessible, and more compact. I’m currently sitting in a reasonably spacious lounge, and seventy years ago the most advanced computer in the world, the ‘Colossus’, couldn’t have fit in the room. I’m typing this post on a device that’s about ten thousand times more powerful than Colossus ever was and it fits in the palm of my hand. My iPhone has more processing power than the computers that sent Neil Armstrong to the fucking moon! If you went back in time and showed an iPhone S6 to a man from 1950 he’d think you were a wizard.
Who’s to say what a nuclear weapon will look like in another seventy years? Or a hundred years? Or two hundred years? We already have suitcase nukes. In a few generations we might have pocket nukes. If that day ever comes, and God-boggled psycho’s like Al-Baghdadi are still running around convinced that the world belongs in the seventh century and they get their hands on a device like that, then civilisation is fucked.
Bombing groups like ISIS without tackling the ideas which motivate them is a waste of life, a waste of money, and, most importantly, a waste of time.